Not Honour More
by Signy1
Summary: Speedwriting challenge 2019. Nothing in Stalag 13 was ever quite what it seemed. Nothing ... and no one. Hogan should have known that better than anyone. But as the war winds down, there are still a few surprises for him to discover, and a great many questions that don't have answers. 2020 PBA winner.


The door to his office swung open, and Hogan, looking even more cheerful than usual, strode in. "You wanted to see me, Kommandant?"

Klink looked up from the papers on his desk. "I suppose I did," he said. He shoved the papers aside; they all said essentially the same thing through the layers of carefully masked hysteria, and he didn't want to see them. "The Allies will be here soon, you know. Perhaps another week or two at most."

Hogan's dark eyes gleamed, and just for a moment his lips curved in a predatory smile. "You know, I never like to listen to rumors," he said casually.

"This is no rumor," Klink said quietly. "You and your men will be liberated in a very few days."

"Well, I suppose all good things must come to an end sooner or later. But I will say this; if I ever feel the need to be held prisoner again, I'll give all my business to you."

_You're damned right you would._ "Very amusing, Colonel Hogan. I understand that, as the ranking officer of the camp, I will of course be imprisoned or shot, but I do ask you to show mercy to my men, who were only obeying my orders."

Hogan nodded. "Of course. You've been humane, all things considered. I'll put in a good word for you."

"You're generous. Thank you, Colonel. But while we're being honest with one another, if I could ask a somewhat personal question? I'm not unaware that on… several occasions… you intervened to save my career, if not my life," Klink said. "I'll admit to wondering why."

"I'm not quite sure what you're talking about," Hogan said blandly.

"Colonel Hogan, the war is over. The charade has ended. As one officer to another, as one man to another, I am asking you to tell me why you helped me."

"You want to know why we saved you? You want the truth?" Hogan shoved his cap back. All things considered, Klink _had_ been comparatively humane, and when Hogan was feeling reasonable, he could even admit that. But there were a great many things to be considered, and they included sawdusty bread, stolen Red Cross packages, icy showers, roll calls, withheld mail, delousing powder, strip searches, gleeful mockery, days and weeks and months and _years_ in the cooler, and a thousand other offenses against basic decency, all of them designed to break the prisoners by inches, one tiny indignity at a time. Humiliation left deeper scars than beatings, and could be far more crippling.

Klink had, undeniably, been better than most others in his position. The survivors of previous regimes grudgingly admitted as much. But that wasn't even close to good enough, not by a long shot, and in his darker moments, Hogan would have liked to give the Kraut exactly that. The war was over. A little honesty, Hogan felt, could do no real harm at this point. "Fine. Here goes. We saved your skinny neck because we _needed _you. We needed to keep you here as Kommandant for the duration. You really want to know why?"

Klink, for one dizzying moment, asked himself if he really did want the truth after all. He decided that he did, because it was better to know a terrible truth than suspect one, but it was a close-run thing. "Why?"

"Because you're sneaky, you're nasty, you're corrupt, occasionally you're sadistic, and God knows you've never gone out of your way to make our lives easier. But when it comes right down to it, Klink, you always treated us like prisoners of war." Hogan laughed bitterly. "Not like animals, not like criminals, not like slaves. You treated us, more or less, if mostly less, like men. Like human beings. And I couldn't take the chance that we'd get that lucky twice. I had to throw around the Geneva Convention every other sentence, feels like, and I wasn't ashamed to beg, bluster, and blackmail as needed, but credit where it's due, you did mostly abide by it. You're the best enemy a man ever had."

Klink didn't say anything.

Hogan barreled on, the accumulated anger of years fueling his tirade. "Yeah, lucky us, right? Getting a peach like you? The hell of it is that it's the truth! You know Corporal Newkirk. Been here since they built the damn place. He won't talk much about what the previous Kommandants were like and I'm pretty sure that I never want to hear the details. What I do know is that at least one of them had him worked over so badly that when he takes off his shirt at night he looks like a goddamned topographical map. And then there's Sergeant O'Connell. Transferred in after spending some eight months at fun-filled Stalag Seven. He talks in his sleep, and if you're ever feeling hard up for a good nightmare, come on by and listen some evening. Don't even get me started on Airman Horowitz. You get the picture? I could go on all day! Floggings, starvation, torture, rape—if humans have invented it, I've got men who have gone through it. But not here. Credit where it's due; that sort of thing didn't happen here. Not while you were in charge, anyway. So no, Colonel, I didn't _dare_ let Burkhalter ship you off to Russia. Not for your sake—for _ours._"

"I see. I suppose I should take that as a compliment," said Klink, after a moment.

"Sure, why not? We all have to be proud of something, I guess. If 'not quite as bad as the rest of my compatriots' is all you've got, if it's the best you can do, then, by all means, don't let me stop you."

"Ah. Yes, well; perhaps it is the best I can do. Tell me something." He looked at the American. In a matter-of-fact voice, he asked, "Have your men collapsed the tunnels yet? Or is Carter still making up the necessary explosives?"

Hogan's expression didn't change. "You're joking, of course."

Klink just smiled. That wasn't much of a denial. In fact, by the usual standards of a Hogan-rigmarole, that barely counted as a _sentence._ He had never—_ever_—seen the man so completely at a loss, and some small, vindictive part of him felt triumphant. Another part of him, though, was oddly disappointed. He supposed that somewhere, deep down, he'd hoped that Hogan knew. That Hogan had understood.

Well, it wasn't the _worst_ disappointment of his life. It wasn't even the worst disappointment of this war. If Hogan really _had_ dismissed him as some sort of cross between an ogre and an oaf, it was, he tried to convince himself, a testament to his own acting abilities. It still stung.

"You are a very clever man, Colonel Hogan," Klink said. "I admit it; you are one of the cleverest men I have ever met. But you do have one very serious fault in that regard—you don't seem to understand that even though most people are not as clever as you are, that does not necessarily mean that they're stupid." He took off his monocle, polished it with a handkerchief. "For instance, Colonel Hogan… _I_ am not stupid."

Hogan licked suddenly dry lips. "Why, Kommandant… I never thought you were," he said, with a very good approximation of his usual tones.

"You must have been the only man in Germany who didn't, then," Klink said. "I certainly worked hard enough to convey that impression."

"Why would you want to do that?" Hogan asked. "Just to stay here, and keep yourself away from the front? There had to be easier ways."

"Undoubtedly there were," Klink said. "But no, it had nothing to do with avoiding a combat unit. I had to remain here if I were to ensure that _you_ remained here. I assume that you do realize that most officers would have liked nothing better than to uncover an espionage ring here in the heart of Germany." With a tight smile, he leaned back in his chair and looked at Hogan. "Quite a feather in one's cap, really. And a very good way to achieve promotion."

Hogan didn't rise to the bait.

"To be brutally frank, Colonel Hogan, there were times I thought you were _trying_ to be discovered. Did you honestly think that pasting a moustache on your lip was any kind of disguise? And your aliases! Hoganheim, Hoganmuller, Hoganstein, Von Hoganberg… is your memory so poor that you couldn't remember anything more complicated?" Klink snorted, opened his humidor, and extracted the two remaining cigars. He handed one to Hogan. "Here. I know you prefer to steal them, but spare me having to pretend that I don't see you doing it, all right?"

Hogan took it automatically, and let it rest awkwardly in his hand.

"Perhaps you're right, and I didn't go very far out of my way to make your lives more comfortable. Perhaps I could have done more in that regard," said Klink. "But I did what I could to make your lives _longer_. I did everything in my power to keep you here in Stalag 13, as a prisoner of war, with all the rights and privileges that implies. There are far less pleasant places that you and your men could have been sent, where you would have had no rights at all, and there were no few officers who wanted to see you in one of them. I prevented that."

It was Hogan's turn to ask. "And why did you do that?"

"Because, Colonel Hogan, I am a German, and I am proud of it. I love my country. I have spent my entire adult life in her devoted service, and I am completely loyal to my homeland and my people. I am loyal to _Germany_," he repeated, stressing the name. "Not the Third Reich. Please understand that there is a difference. The Fuhrer and those who follow him are a cancer, and they needed to be burned out of my country. The madness needed to end. And you… you and your men were the best weapon I had at my disposal to see to it that it did."

Klink squared his shoulders. "Perhaps I really am the cowardly fool that everyone thinks I am. Perhaps I could have done more. Perhaps I _should_ have done more. But I fought to save my country's soul in the only way I could think of. When I stand before God to answer for my life, I don't know whether it will be enough. Probably not. But I tried, Colonel Hogan. And I wanted you to know that I tried."

Hogan just looked at him for a long moment. Klink was still an unimpressive specimen; middle-aged, balding, and scrawny. His monocle was still ridiculous, his voice was still shrill, and he was still… Klink. And yet, there was something different about him. Perhaps it was simply that, in defeat, he had traded his stiff pride for a simple dignity. Perhaps it was the lowering of his familiar mask. Maybe it was just the fact that the balance of power had abruptly shifted, and he could finally discard the Kommandant in favor of the Oberst. Maybe it was that they didn't have to be enemies anymore. Maybe it was that they should never have had to be.

Hogan pulled himself to attention, and, deliberately, he saluted. Not the perfunctory flick of the fingers, or the sloppy, disrespectful semi-wave he'd employed since his arrival. No, this was a real salute. Officer to officer. Man to man. It was the only reply he could think to make.

Even if it was true—and he did believe that Klink was telling the truth as he saw it—what, in the end, did it really amount to? They both knew that there were German officers who had done much more, who had risked and lost their lives in more active attempts at saving their country. Even if protecting Hogan and his men was all he had it in him to do, he could at least have _said so_; how much more might Hogan have been able to accomplish if he hadn't had to worry about keeping Klink in the dark? And, most disturbing of all, if things had not gone as they did, if worse had come to worst, how far would Klink's protection really have gone? They had come within a breath of discovery and destruction on no few occasions. If it came down to preserving their lives or his own, Hogan, fairly or not, had a hard time believing that Klink would have hesitated for a moment before throwing them to the wolves. If it had become a choice of retaining his life or his soul, which would have won out in the end?

Hogan didn't know the answers to any of those questions. And he didn't need to, he decided. Hypotheticals and motivations and psychological inquiry be damned; owing, it seemed, at least in part to Klink, they had won. They were alive. The world was safe, and that was all that mattered. In all probability, even if he escaped legal consequences, Klink would spend the rest of his life crucifying himself on his own doubts. Was that too mild a punishment, or too severe? Hogan didn't know the answer to _that_ question either.

"You really are the best enemy a man ever had," Hogan said again, this time without the sarcasm.

Klink smiled faintly, sadly. "Thank you, Colonel Hogan." A pause, then, very, very softly, both of them knowing that it was for the last time, he said, "Dismissed."

He turned back to his papers. Hogan walked towards the door, but paused for a moment with his hand on the doorknob. The world had become a subtly different place since he'd walked in, and he wasn't sure yet what it was going to look like when he walked out.

As he left the Kommandatur, though, with the sun doing its dogged best to shine through the barbed wire, it occurred to him that his entire world—no, that _he himself_— had become radically different since walking into Stalag 13. Perhaps Klink had, too.

For the first time, the question of what it was going to be like when he walked back out had become a somewhat frightening one. Because for the first time, he wasn't sure he knew the answer.

*.*.*.*.*.*

Author's Note: The title is from Richard Lovelace's poem 'To Lucasta, Going to the Wars.' The text is an attempt to answer the question of whether Klink really was as stupid as he seemed to be... and, if not, how he was able to justify being a part of arguably the most evil regime in human history.


End file.
